SEO Is Worthless (Without a WordPress Blog)

ORANGE COUNTY, CA – It’s our normal SEO practice to build a custom WordPress blog for our new clients and continually post on these blogs. However, recently we’ve come across new clients who are reluctant to have a blog hosted on their site. We tell these clients not to waste their time and money on SEO, and there are many reasons why blogs are vital to optimal SEO.

Let’s start with the basics of why search engines were built: because text existed on the Internet in an unorganized fashion. Search engine spiders indexed, organized and provided the text in an easy-to-use format for their users. Google rates and ranks sites based on three important factors: content, relevancy and popularity.

We have said before that content is king when it comes to SEO. After all, Google feeds and survives on content. Google also loves sites that feed it more quality content on a regular basis. As we explained before, a WordPress blog is the best platform for SEO.

Graphic Courtesy of Dpk-GraphicDesign.com

If you are competing with strong rivals, you can have an advantage over them by simply writing and posting articles on your site’s blog on a regular basis. “Regular basis” is a loose term – for some smaller businesses, writing once a month gives you that advantage. But the reality is that for most e-commerce sites, writing once a day may still not be enough. So, depending on your market, you need to decide how often you want to write.

No matter how often you post, always remember the most important factor for more SEO success: stick to your strategy and continue at it for at least six months to see the results. In the meantime, here are some of the most common areas of a blog that I am asked to explain to my clients.

Why Can’t I Use My Off-Site Blog?

You may have a blog that is hosted on blogger: example.blogger.com. Whatever you write and post on this blog will not affect your main site: www.example.com. Remember, your goal should be to show Google that www.example.com is being updated on a regular basis. Thus, your blog needs to be hosted on your site: www.example.com/blog/.

Why Do I Need A WordPress Blog?

There are many blog templates you can integrate with your site, but through our research and experience we have concluded that WordPress is the best for this purpose. Here are some reasons:

WordPress Easily Allows for Skin Changes

You can conveniently design and tweak the look of your blog with WordPress. You do need to know web-development to do so, but they provide you with all the tools you need. So, your blog will look like a page of your site.

Because WordPress is the most popular blog CMS, it has many users and many web developers behind it. Thus, you have a huge pool of free WordPress templates to use, as well as lots of plugins. Also, any time you get stuck on something, you can use the many forums on the topic to ask your question. It is also very likely that your question has already been answered by an expert, just look for your topic and search.

WordPress Allows for Permalinks

Permalinks are a great relevancy tool we use to optimize our clients’ sites. Keyword-rich permalinks help your page rank well for your intended keywords. WordPress allows you to easily edit your page’s URL using permalinks.

Here is an example of a keywords-rich permalink: http://www.mastergoogle.com/blog/facebook-and-seo-how-facebook-can-help-your-business.php.

WordPress Allows for Meta Tag Optimization

This is also important. You can write a separate title, description and keywords tags for each of your blog posts.

Google Loves WordPress “Tags”

You can give each post specific “tags” that are basically keywords related to the post (not to be confused with meta tags, which are part of the header code). WordPress creates a specific page for each tag and will group all the posts that have the same tags under it. The URL of this page also includes the tag: http://www.mastergoogle.com/blog/tag/google-seo.

Tag pages rank very well on Google search results because all the content under the tag page are related to the tag keyword.

Using the Blog Feed on Other Pages

Your WordPress Blog Feed could be used on any page of your site. That will help to freshen up your other site pages content since you’re updating your blog content on a regular basis.

Google Indexes WordPress Posts Immediately

When you post on your WordPress blog, Google is pinged and will immediately index your new post and place it in the search results. This eliminates the need for you to have to “submit” your new page to Google or “link” to it from other sites or just simply have to wait for Google to see the new post.

In general, Google loves WordPress sites and will rank sites with such blogs that are updated on a more regular basis better than the competition. If you have any questions, please leave a comment here or contact us directly.

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WordPress Websites Building Websites to Sell

WordPress makes it so easy to build website from scratch in under and hour and sell to anyone for $100’s of dollars. How can a company like Automattic make money if they are giving away all their products (including WordPress) for free? Someone asked this question to WordPress founder Matt at WordCamp India and he surprised, at least some of us, by saying that Automatic is profitable.Here’s how WordPress makes money according to the creator himself:1. Blog Hosting – WordPress offers blog hosting services at $500 per month to big publishers like Om Malik Kajab, All Things D and CNN’s Political Ticker among others. They use WordPress.com’s server infrastructure to host your blog and therefore the performance will obviously be great but unlike other web hosting services, WordPress VIP Hosting doesn’t accept everyone who applies so good luck.2. Google AdSense – Free blogs hosted on WordPress.com may sometimes carry Google ads but these ads may only appear if all the following three conditions are met:1. The visitor is not using Firefox browser.2. He has logged out of his WordPress account, if he has one.3. The referring source is not a WordPress powered blog. So a person reaching abc.wordpress.com from xyz.wordpress.com won’t see any Google Ads.Even with all these conditions, the revenue generated from serving Google AdSense ads on WordPress.com hosted blog may still be significant as do around a billion page views per month. 3. Automattic Kismet – You don’t see Viagra spam in your blog posts because it all gets filtered automatically by Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short), the excellent spam protection plug-in available for WordPress. Now Akismet spam catching technology is free for personal blogs but if you maintain a corporate blog or run a network of blogs, you are required to buy a commercial license of Akismet that starts at around $50 per month. What may surprise you is that professional bloggers, or anyone who is making more than $500 per month in advertising revenue from a vibration speaker WordPress blog, also needs to pay a $5 per month fee for the Akismet license. 4. Premium Accounts – While anyone can host a blog on WordPress.com for free, they charge you a fee iphone speaker if you want to buy additional storage space for your multimedia files or want to use a custom web domain instead of the default wordpress.com sub-domain. These are premium features.There’s also (unconfirmed) talk that WordPress may soon allow users to add AdSense in their free blogs for a subscription fee. 5. Web Host Referrals – WordPress.org suggests of list of third-party web hosting companies where you may self-host your WordPress blog(s) for a fee. Now all these are referral links so Automattic gets a commission per sale.In fact, this hosting referral system may be extremely profitable for Automattic because if you search for “WordPress Hosting” on Google (a very competitive keyword phrase), the first sponsored link on the Google results page is paid by WordPress itself and it says – “Top 5 WordPress Web Hosts – Chosen by the developers of the WordPress blogging software”.6. WordPress Support – If you need help with WordPress (or WordPress MU) but the free support forums aren’t solving the purpose, consider subscribing to the Support Network of Automattic. The WordPress development team will help you solve problems related to your WordPress system and the response time can be as low as 6 hours. This service is primarily for Enterprise users who are willing to shell out a $2.5-5k per year for support.7. Poll Daddy – I am not sure if Matt discussed this but Automattic also provides a paid version of Poll Daddy where you can have unlimited number of questions per survey and there’s no Poll Daddy branding in your polls or surveys.I haven’t allowed myself the luxury of sitting down to write a decent post in me for some time, so this feels good.Especially because it’s one of those ‘James comes out on top at the end’ posts, which is always nice to share – and it’s also a topic very close to my heart- making WordPress MU work in terms of revenue, and specifically, where Edublogs is concerned (although I’ll also make fairly frequent reference to WordPress.com too).Now, to start off I should note that Edublogs (a WordPress MU site for education) was started off not as a business but to meet the practical satellite phone purposes of providing blogs to academics via a simpler approach than individual WordPress installs. It also wasn’t started off buy a business-person, it was started off by a lecturer in education design (me) without even the merest whiff of funding and on a $7 p/month hosting plan.Now, almost 4 years later, it’s one of the largest blog hosting sites on the web, employs multiple staff, runs on hosting that costs upwards of AU$10k per month and, most importantly, is a sustainable (and growing) business.How did we do this?Well, by mucho trial and error, I can tell you – there’s almost not a single revenue model we haven’t tried – and some have worked, some have worked (a bit) and some have been abject failures – here they are, in reverse order of success – with our experience tied in to each.Donations I have a personal objection to donations, and I think contemplated it once and quickly put it away – I mean, why should anyone donate to you as opposed to , say, Oxfam – and if they did, what would they be getting out of it (as opposed to, say, sponsoring a child)? It sucks, you’ll hardly get any, and it’s basically begging.Works for Wikipedia because they are one of the largest websites in the world and provide something of intrinsic value that a lot of people use all the time – won’t work for you. Sorry. Sponsorship Our first semi-successful model, we wanted to cover our burgeoning hosting costs so we reached out and a small independent ed tech company in the UK gave us $3000 for a years worth of advertising and to integrate with their site for users… I reckon they got a good deal The key to this one is that it isn’t advertising – it’s finding a partner who’ll enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship with you, and as such is a great way to build your site and exposure, but perhaps not the greatest way to try and make a lot of money unless you’re starting from a position of some serious strength (and how many of us start like that eh?)AdvertisingAnother one of the semi-successful models. But, as an online editor at theage.com.au I found out the secret to advertising – are you ready?… drum roll …Be a big, established, successful media company – or, at the very least, be a magazine that’s being started by one or an experience big media exec with a few mil backing. Or be Darren Rowse  Or, really really clever while at the same time being wordpress.com (read on for that bit).Other than that advertising for the rest of us is at best semi-rewarding and at worst hardly ipod speaker even coffee money.But that’s not to say that there aren’t great ways of doing it.For example, we started showing ads using the brilliant adapted Who Sees Ads for WPMU plugin – which essentially allows you to place ads across themes and then determine, with site-wide rules, how they are displayed.This is how WordPress.com show ads, and it’s utterly brilliant, with only one drawback. You need to be absolutely huge for it to work, for example, Edublogs does just over a million uniques a month and that *simply isn’t enough* – by my calculations you’d need at least 3-5 million before you started covering your hosting costs, 10 million before you start drawing a nice wage and 20 to be a viable company – and also have some sway with your Adsense eCPM and custom ad units (using this method alone). Luckily for wp.com they have 266 million and it’s far from their sole revenue gismo play source… nice work guys And, while we no longer use this approach (I’ll get on to how we much more effectively use advertising at the end), it’s also a great way to display all sorts of other things across your network – but that’s by the by, let’s keep satellite phones on thinking about the MONEY!Selling Something ElseYep, it’s quite simple, you offer a great, free, maybe even advertising free, site in the hope to shift some other product… for example, pets goods (for pet blogs).And this can really really work! For Edublogs pubrewards we’ve been selling for the last 2 years Edublogs Campus – basically a hosted standalone version of Edublogs for individual schools and it’s done really well. Had we been selling school IT resources, textbooks or something else –  I think that might have worked well too.Sure, you have to take into account that you are going to be selling to a particular crowd – but you can also turn them into affiliate sellers for you, and use their technical skills to your advantage (they are most likely gonna be pretty techie broadcasters) – in fact you can even get them to send out email invites (via imported web mail address books – anyone say ‘Twitter’…) to sell whatever it is that you are offering.So this one get a thumbs up from me.UpgradesWe’re almost there, because this can be an extremely successful revenue stream in its own right.However, it’s got to be used wisely, and the most important thing to remember is that people won’t pay for stuff they don’t want or need – so, don’t go offering them the icing when you could be offering them the cake (if that makes any sense).Let’s take wordpress.com for example – now they were really keen on early adopters and so the CSS editing upgrade made perfect sense early on (I have no idea how successful these were by the way), but they also have some excellent and very clever tricks up their sleeves – for example – you may have a gazillion GB already as upload space but you can’t upload anything beyond a large picture to it unless you purchase the extra space upgrade… clever, being able to upload podcasts, videos and alike is definitely the cake.And now let’s take Edublogs, we offered a whole stack of cool extra features, twitter integration, more plugins, extra storage, respect, cool badges and more… we simply set it up using our simple custom Upgrades (with PayPal integration) plugin…. it worked brilliantly… and it so failed it wasn’t funny.You see we already allowed people to upload what they wanted. And already gave them heaps of cool plugins. And they could do all sorts of cool stuff regardless. Hardly anyone signed up, and those that did – I suspect – did mostly out of the kindness of their hearts.FAIL. Indeed.But, all was not lost, because this whole cake thing occurred to me and I got myself thinking about a great game I used to play back in the day called Hattrick…SupporterNow, Hattrick is a football management game, and its free, but you can sign up to be a Supporter and OMG it’s cakelicious (ok, will stop the cake stuff now).You get to see the faces of your players, extra tactical tools, a star next to your name (means a big deal in a site which is also a social networking setup as much as anything else) and all sorts of other great stuff. The game itself is completely free to play, but I understand that a goodly % of users sign up to be a supporter after a bit (or gift it to each other) – and, as there are almost a million players, and being a Supporter isn’t that cheap (something like $50 annually), they do pretty well!!!So, moving onto WPMU, let’s forget the ‘upgrades’ bit of things – let’s make it much simpler; free users get x / Supporters (or whatever you want to call it) get y.And lets say x = ads on their site / no access to plugins / no acccess to other extra features / reduced storage space etc.And lets say y = no ads / masses of plugins / other great features / 5GB space / nice badge etc. etc.Well, that’s what we’ve done. And it works. A lot.And even better – you can do it too, we’ve released the Supporter plugin over at WPMU DEV Premium (so you get priority support / upgrades and general goodness as well).Put simply, you can use this plugin to create your own Typepad, or Squarespace or a premium blogging platform that allows users to do (and receive) so much more than they would for a free blog – or from a free blogging site like blogger or wp.com.Hook it into Supporter only personal support, add extra features to your site that are supporter only, set them up with free classifieds, generally give them some serious loving… either way, your business model just started looking a great deal healthier!Or, go one step beyond what we do and just restrict absolutely critical ingredients, like ‘Write Post’ to Supporter only – that way you can give new users 14 days free, and then shut them down until they pay (just like Typepad. The best thing is they get to log in and see the entire site and backend, but not use it until they’ve paid.Did I mention we’ve included a special plugin with the supporter pack that does just that for you)And did I mention it’s all based on PayPal subscriptions not single payments – unless you want it to be… now I don’t need to explain why that’s better do I?And that’s where we’re at now, and I’m sure things’ll change again in the future, but I gotta say I’m pretty happy with the present. And, at the present, revenues are is where it is at.Have I messed any revenue approaches you have tried? Do you completely agree or disagree with any of the above? Let me know in the comments

WordPress Websites Building Websites to Sell

WordPress makes it so easy to build website from scratch in under and hour and sell to anyone for $100’s of dollars. How can a company like Automattic make money if they are giving away all their products (including WordPress) for free? Someone asked this question to WordPress founder Matt at WordCamp India and he surprised, at least some of us, by saying that Automatic is profitable.Here’s how WordPress makes money according to the creator himself:1. Blog Hosting – WordPress offers blog hosting services at $500 per month to big publishers like Om Malik Kajab, All Things D and CNN’s Political Ticker among others. They use WordPress.com’s server infrastructure to host your blog and therefore the performance will obviously be great but unlike other web hosting services, WordPress VIP Hosting doesn’t accept everyone who applies so good luck.2. Google AdSense – Free blogs hosted on WordPress.com may sometimes carry Google ads but these ads may only appear if all the following three conditions are met:1. The visitor is not using Firefox browser.2. He has logged out of his WordPress account, if he has one.3. The referring source is not a WordPress powered blog. So a person reaching abc.wordpress.com from xyz.wordpress.com won’t see any Google Ads.Even with all these conditions, the revenue generated from serving Google AdSense ads on WordPress.com hosted blog may still be significant as do around a billion page views per month. 3. Automattic Kismet – You don’t see Viagra spam in your blog posts because it all gets filtered automatically by Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short), the excellent spam protection plug-in available for WordPress. Now Akismet spam catching technology is free for personal blogs but if you maintain a corporate blog or run a network of blogs, you are required to buy a commercial license of Akismet that starts at around $50 per month. What may surprise you is that professional bloggers, or anyone who is making more than $500 per month in advertising revenue from a vibration speaker WordPress blog, also needs to pay a $5 per month fee for the Akismet license. 4. Premium Accounts – While anyone can host a blog on WordPress.com for free, they charge you a fee iphone speaker if you want to buy additional storage space for your multimedia files or want to use a custom web domain instead of the default wordpress.com sub-domain. These are premium features.There’s also (unconfirmed) talk that WordPress may soon allow users to add AdSense in their free blogs for a subscription fee. 5. Web Host Referrals – WordPress.org suggests of list of third-party web hosting companies where you may self-host your WordPress blog(s) for a fee. Now all these are referral links so Automattic gets a commission per sale.In fact, this hosting referral system may be extremely profitable for Automattic because if you search for “WordPress Hosting” on Google (a very competitive keyword phrase), the first sponsored link on the Google results page is paid by WordPress itself and it says – “Top 5 WordPress Web Hosts – Chosen by the developers of the WordPress blogging software”.6. WordPress Support – If you need help with WordPress (or WordPress MU) but the free support forums aren’t solving the purpose, consider subscribing to the Support Network of Automattic. The WordPress development team will help you solve problems related to your WordPress system and the response time can be as low as 6 hours. This service is primarily for Enterprise users who are willing to shell out a $2.5-5k per year for support.7. Poll Daddy – I am not sure if Matt discussed this but Automattic also provides a paid version of Poll Daddy where you can have unlimited number of questions per survey and there’s no Poll Daddy branding in your polls or surveys.I haven’t allowed myself the luxury of sitting down to write a decent post in me for some time, so this feels good.Especially because it’s one of those ‘James comes out on top at the end’ posts, which is always nice to share – and it’s also a topic very close to my heart- making WordPress MU work in terms of revenue, and specifically, where Edublogs is concerned (although I’ll also make fairly frequent reference to WordPress.com too).Now, to start off I should note that Edublogs (a WordPress MU site for education) was started off not as a business but to meet the practical satellite phone purposes of providing blogs to academics via a simpler approach than individual WordPress installs. It also wasn’t started off buy a business-person, it was started off by a lecturer in education design (me) without even the merest whiff of funding and on a $7 p/month hosting plan.Now, almost 4 years later, it’s one of the largest blog hosting sites on the web, employs multiple staff, runs on hosting that costs upwards of AU$10k per month and, most importantly, is a sustainable (and growing) business.How did we do this?Well, by mucho trial and error, I can tell you – there’s almost not a single revenue model we haven’t tried – and some have worked, some have worked (a bit) and some have been abject failures – here they are, in reverse order of success – with our experience tied in to each.Donations I have a personal objection to donations, and I think contemplated it once and quickly put it away – I mean, why should anyone donate to you as opposed to , say, Oxfam – and if they did, what would they be getting out of it (as opposed to, say, sponsoring a child)? It sucks, you’ll hardly get any, and it’s basically begging.Works for Wikipedia because they are one of the largest websites in the world and provide something of intrinsic value that a lot of people use all the time – won’t work for you. Sorry. Sponsorship Our first semi-successful model, we wanted to cover our burgeoning hosting costs so we reached out and a small independent ed tech company in the UK gave us $3000 for a years worth of advertising and to integrate with their site for users… I reckon they got a good deal The key to this one is that it isn’t advertising – it’s finding a partner who’ll enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship with you, and as such is a great way to build your site and exposure, but perhaps not the greatest way to try and make a lot of money unless you’re starting from a position of some serious strength (and how many of us start like that eh?)AdvertisingAnother one of the semi-successful models. But, as an online editor at theage.com.au I found out the secret to advertising – are you ready?… drum roll …Be a big, established, successful media company – or, at the very least, be a magazine that’s being started by one or an experience big media exec with a few mil backing. Or be Darren Rowse  Or, really really clever while at the same time being wordpress.com (read on for that bit).Other than that advertising for the rest of us is at best semi-rewarding and at worst hardly ipod speaker even coffee money.But that’s not to say that there aren’t great ways of doing it.For example, we started showing ads using the brilliant adapted Who Sees Ads for WPMU plugin – which essentially allows you to place ads across themes and then determine, with site-wide rules, how they are displayed.This is how WordPress.com show ads, and it’s utterly brilliant, with only one drawback. You need to be absolutely huge for it to work, for example, Edublogs does just over a million uniques a month and that *simply isn’t enough* – by my calculations you’d need at least 3-5 million before you started covering your hosting costs, 10 million before you start drawing a nice wage and 20 to be a viable company – and also have some sway with your Adsense eCPM and custom ad units (using this method alone). Luckily for wp.com they have 266 million and it’s far from their sole revenue gismo play source… nice work guys And, while we no longer use this approach (I’ll get on to how we much more effectively use advertising at the end), it’s also a great way to display all sorts of other things across your network – but that’s by the by, let’s keep satellite phones on thinking about the MONEY!Selling Something ElseYep, it’s quite simple, you offer a great, free, maybe even advertising free, site in the hope to shift some other product… for example, pets goods (for pet blogs).And this can really really work! For Edublogs pubrewards we’ve been selling for the last 2 years Edublogs Campus – basically a hosted standalone version of Edublogs for individual schools and it’s done really well. Had we been selling school IT resources, textbooks or something else –  I think that might have worked well too.Sure, you have to take into account that you are going to be selling to a particular crowd – but you can also turn them into affiliate sellers for you, and use their technical skills to your advantage (they are most likely gonna be pretty techie broadcasters) – in fact you can even get them to send out email invites (via imported web mail address books – anyone say ‘Twitter’…) to sell whatever it is that you are offering.So this one get a thumbs up from me.UpgradesWe’re almost there, because this can be an extremely successful revenue stream in its own right.However, it’s got to be used wisely, and the most important thing to remember is that people won’t pay for stuff they don’t want or need – so, don’t go offering them the icing when you could be offering them the cake (if that makes any sense).Let’s take wordpress.com for example – now they were really keen on early adopters and so the CSS editing upgrade made perfect sense early on (I have no idea how successful these were by the way), but they also have some excellent and very clever tricks up their sleeves – for example – you may have a gazillion GB already as upload space but you can’t upload anything beyond a large picture to it unless you purchase the extra space upgrade… clever, being able to upload podcasts, videos and alike is definitely the cake.And now let’s take Edublogs, we offered a whole stack of cool extra features, twitter integration, more plugins, extra storage, respect, cool badges and more… we simply set it up using our simple custom Upgrades (with PayPal integration) plugin…. it worked brilliantly… and it so failed it wasn’t funny.You see we already allowed people to upload what they wanted. And already gave them heaps of cool plugins. And they could do all sorts of cool stuff regardless. Hardly anyone signed up, and those that did – I suspect – did mostly out of the kindness of their hearts.FAIL. Indeed.But, all was not lost, because this whole cake thing occurred to me and I got myself thinking about a great game I used to play back in the day called Hattrick…SupporterNow, Hattrick is a football management game, and its free, but you can sign up to be a Supporter and OMG it’s cakelicious (ok, will stop the cake stuff now).You get to see the faces of your players, extra tactical tools, a star next to your name (means a big deal in a site which is also a social networking setup as much as anything else) and all sorts of other great stuff. The game itself is completely free to play, but I understand that a goodly % of users sign up to be a supporter after a bit (or gift it to each other) – and, as there are almost a million players, and being a Supporter isn’t that cheap (something like $50 annually), they do pretty well!!!So, moving onto WPMU, let’s forget the ‘upgrades’ bit of things – let’s make it much simpler; free users get x / Supporters (or whatever you want to call it) get y.And lets say x = ads on their site / no access to plugins / no acccess to other extra features / reduced storage space etc.And lets say y = no ads / masses of plugins / other great features / 5GB space / nice badge etc. etc.Well, that’s what we’ve done. And it works. A lot.And even better – you can do it too, we’ve released the Supporter plugin over at WPMU DEV Premium (so you get priority support / upgrades and general goodness as well).Put simply, you can use this plugin to create your own Typepad, or Squarespace or a premium blogging platform that allows users to do (and receive) so much more than they would for a free blog – or from a free blogging site like blogger or wp.com.Hook it into Supporter only personal support, add extra features to your site that are supporter only, set them up with free classifieds, generally give them some serious loving… either way, your business model just started looking a great deal healthier!Or, go one step beyond what we do and just restrict absolutely critical ingredients, like ‘Write Post’ to Supporter only – that way you can give new users 14 days free, and then shut them down until they pay (just like Typepad. The best thing is they get to log in and see the entire site and backend, but not use it until they’ve paid.Did I mention we’ve included a special plugin with the supporter pack that does just that for you)And did I mention it’s all based on PayPal subscriptions not single payments – unless you want it to be… now I don’t need to explain why that’s better do I?And that’s where we’re at now, and I’m sure things’ll change again in the future, but I gotta say I’m pretty happy with the present. And, at the present, revenues are is where it is at.Have I messed any revenue approaches you have tried? Do you completely agree or disagree with any of the above? Let me know in the comments

Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress: Which Blogging Platform Fits Your SEO Needs?

NASHVILLE, TN – Evaluating your SEO strategy may seem daunting, but one adjustment you could make (if you aren’t already), is to add a blog to your business’s website. Master Google’s CEO Ali Husayni emphasizes the importance of blogs to overall SEO efforts.

“Blogs seem to be an important part of any site because they get updated on a regular basis. I suggest site owners should write for their sites on a regular basis. The more fresh, quality and relevant content they post to their sites, the better chances of exposure and inclusion on Google search results they will have,” Husayni says.

Free blogging services make it easy to set up a blog and start posting content. There are tons of free blogging websites out there, but for today we’ll focus on Blogger (Blogspot), WordPress, and Tumblr – arguably the biggest platforms for blogging. (Some other popular ones include Weebly, TypePad, and Live Journal.)

As a blog enthusiast, I’ve tried out all three of these. I find Tumblr visually stimulating, but for SEO optimization, it seems Blogger (powered by Google) and WordPress are more content heavy and content friendly. All three platforms let users upload posts from their phones, schedule posts, and view statistics. While Blogger and Tumblr show Google Analytics and allow third party tools, WordPress only shows users WordPress Stats.

Blogger

Google’s free blog service, Blogger, allows users a simple and visually dynamic website that takes just a minute to set up. On your dashboard, you can view statistics of your visitors, save other blogs in your reading list, and add widgets to your sidebar.

Pros: In Blogger, you’re able to edit your template’s HTML and save those changes. If you code your own themes, you can upload them to Blogger. This makes it pretty easy to customize, assuming you know HTML, while still being free. No advertisements will show on your Blogspot blog unless you choose to monetize your blog. Within your Blogger dashboard, you can view your website optimized for a mobile phone.

Cons: One of the biggest complaints I’ve seen with Blogger is the inability to create a static landing page on your blog or website. There seem to be a few ways to overcome this through HTML, but they seem to be hit or miss.

WordPress

WordPress hosts many personal and business blogs as well, and users seem to agree that self-hosting your WordPress blog is the way to go, but you’ll have to pay to host it yourself. The free version seems to have good benefits as well. WordPress also has widgets, and the layout includes categories for you to add key words and tags, increasing your SEO reach.

Pros: WordPress, like blogger, lets users easily add tags to blog posts, allowing for optimized search results. Here you can also “team blog” by setting up titles for group users like Administrator, Editor, Contributor, and Author. These contributors can log in and upload posts, and then the Administrator can post them. WordPress also offers more storage space in their free version at 3 GB. (Blogger offers 1 GB in storage and 1 more GB in photo storage via Picasa. Tumblr offers 1 GB.)

Cons: WordPress doesn’t allow users to manipulate the blog templates in CSS without paying an upgrade fee. Your blog posts will also be accompanied with advertisements (unless you pay to upgrade).

Tumblr

While Tumblr is the baby of these three platforms, it has gained quite a bit of blogging street credibility.

Pros: With Tumblr, you can follow other blogs easily. From your dashboard, you’ll see a timeline of blogs that you follow, with the most recent at the top. This layout is optimized for comments and for sharing other people’s posts on your own blog (called “re-blogging” here). When you post something to Tumblr, you first choose the type of post, such as “quote”, “video”, “photo”, “text”, “link”, or “audio.” If you have an iPhone or Android, posting content through the Tumblr app is super simple. Tumblr also has many more free design templates than WordPress or Blogger.

Cons: Tumblr may not be the place to reach all potential clients. If you’re an artist or a photographer, i.e, someone with a visual portfolio, Tumblr might be the way to go. If you’re writing lots of content, Tumblr may not be the most text-friendly place to blog.

This is a very brief overview of these powerful services. It barely scratches the surface, and the best way to get to know a blogging service is to try it! There’s no harm in trying out a Blogger, Tumblr, and a WordPress blog, especially since they’re all free. See what format you like, what makes sense to you and your business. Combined with a fierce SEO strategy, like the ones implemented through Master Google’s SEO experts, blogging provides fresh content to move your business up the search results page.

Which blogging service do you use for your business? What advantages and disadvantages have you found with your preferred service?

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